M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of the Sacred

Alexanderýs central question addresses the secularization of feminism

and the dire need to address the sacred at a time when fundamentalism

and political faith-based initiatives on the part of the state have

emerged to appropriate the domain of the spiritual. Experience is an

important dimension of daily life as well as an important category for

feminism, but we have rendered it as if it were absent Spirit,

understood it primarily as secularized and antithetical to the sacred.

Using her own priestancy in two African-based spiritual communities of

Vodun and Santeria, Alexander traces how experience, history, memory,

consciousness, voice and agencyýcustomarily positioned as secular--are

all readily intelligible within the precinct of the sacred. What would

taking the sacred seriously mean for transnational feminism particularly

because the majority of people in the world understand who they are in

what they do through this prism? What would taking the sacred seriously

mean for ourselves?